


Wrought

by thedevilchicken



Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-20
Updated: 2019-03-20
Packaged: 2019-11-26 10:17:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18179324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: There are things the firstborn son of the Steward of Gondor should and shouldn't do.





	Wrought

**Author's Note:**

  * For [salazarastark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/salazarastark/gifts).



There are things that the firstborn son of the Steward of Gondor should and shouldn't do. 

These things aren't written down; there isn't a list that anyone could produce from any dry old work of Gondorian etiquette, but Boromir knows them nonetheless. He's meant to be fine and strong and upstanding, and to inspire those qualities in others. He's meant to show courage in battle, and to inspire that courage in the men he leads. He's meant to honour his father and his father's father before him. He's meant to stand tall and to set an example. He's meant to carry on their long and illustrious family line. 

Boromir knows these things and he accepts them as his duty, just like all men in the world have duties. He intends to be the man he's expected to be and he tries whenever he's able to live up to the expectations placed on him - largely he succeeds, but some things come to him more easily than others. Some of those things he finds very difficult indeed. 

"Are you coming up?" Gant asks.

Gant is leaning with one shoulder pressed against the wall, looking at him, his gaze on him. The doorway at his elbow leads away from the workshop and up the narrow staircase to his rooms above, which Boromir knows because he's been there before. Gant has no expectations of him. It's a suggestion, not a demand; he could say no, and he should do, but some things are difficult. At this precise moment, saying no is one of those difficult things.

It's dusk outside and the setting autumn sun casts Gant's sharp features in warm golden bronze. He's tall and broad-shouldered, with a slim waist that's lost beneath his worn old leather apron. His greying black hair is swept back into a plait at the nape of his neck to keep it out of his eyes while he works. A week-old beard lines his angular jaw; sometimes he shaves it and sometimes he lets it grow for a while, and sometimes he spends so long working metal between forge and anvil that it almost smells singed, at least up close.

Gant rubs his mouth with the back of his freshly washed hand as he looks at him. The pads of his fingers are calloused from his work. His hands are scarred in places, too - old signs of his trade from his apprentice years - and Boromir knows precisely how those scars feel. Against his own fingertips. Against his skin.

There are protocols that should be followed and while both of them know this, Boromir is the one who feels their weight. That weight is lesser only to the weight of his lover's gaze; Gant doesn't try to persuade him one way or the other and he never has done, but he is nevertheless persuaded. Boromir moves past him with a glance almost as pointed as the neat rows of tools laid out in Gant's workshop. He mounts the stair. He can almost feel Gant's footsteps behind him on the worn old wooden staircase pounding like a drum inside his chest. 

He remembers when they met. He was a lot younger then, not that he feels so much different from that now; he was thirty years old and not close to forty, and he'd been just been disappointed by the work delivered by his armourer. What he'd wanted was good steel and thick leather and what he'd got was decorative and overwrought, and so he'd chased down the man with the sturdiest, most hardest-wearing armour that he knew of and he'd asked him where he'd had it made. He was directed to the workshop of the blacksmith Eradan, to a black-haired man named Gard or Gand. His name was Gant and when Boromir walked in, he'd just stripped to the waist. He caught him in the act of tipping half a bucket of rainwater over his head to cool down from the forge.

Boromir remembers watching. There were wisps of black hair pulled loose from Gant's plait that clung to his face and his neck and his shoulders and the water ran down his arms, down his chest, to the belt at his waist, streaking his skin with soot from the fires. He wiped his face with a cloth and then looked straight at Boromir, almost like he could tell he might have liked to lick that water off his skin and damn the fucking soot. He didn't even look like he was bothered by the idea. He just looked inquisitive.

"Sorry, my lord," he said, "I didn't see you there." Except Boromir wasn't sure how sorry he seemed, to be honest about it, considering he didn't put his shirt back on. He wiped off his chest and his hands before he did that, and even then he didn't hurry, though Boromir couldn't say for sure if he did it just for show or so the fabric wouldn't stick to his damp skin. Then he said, as he pushed his sleeves up to his elbows and pushed his stray hair from his face, "So, what can we do for you? Will I do or should I get my master?"

Boromir smiled. Boromir laughed. "You'll do," he replied. "As it's you I came to see."

Gant's brows rose. "Men like you don't ask for me," he said. "What do you want?"

There were a few things Boromir could have said to that, and a few more things that occurred to him after, but he shook himself and told Gant he was after armour. Gant agreed and they fixed an appointment for the following morning, and the following morning Boromir arrived. As Gant took down his measurements, close by, he smelled of ash and oil and leather and his skin was warm. Boromir's mouth felt dry. The effect was unexpected, but if Gant noticed he didn't show it.

He returned every few days for the next couple of weeks, to see Gant's progress and to see how the pieces began to fit. Sometimes there were other workers there, apprentices or smiths in their own right making use of Eradan's forge, and sometimes the master was there himself. Boromir saw where Gant got his manners from, straightforward and unrattled by rank as Eradan seemed to be even once he recognised Boromir's face. 

He returned every few days until the work was done. And as Gant knelt to give the greaves he'd made just one last fitting, Boromir reached out and tilted his prickly prickly chin with his first two fingers. Gant looked up at him, from his knees on the workshop floor. Boromir's chest felt tight for a moment, but then Gant rose and turned away and that moment passed.

"I've got my own room," Gant said, with his back turned, as he packaged up the armour. "Behind the stable, across the yard." He glanced back over his shoulder for a second, then he looked away again. "No one would see if you came in after dark." 

He didn't reply. He left and he sent someone back to fetch him the armour, like he was offended by the offer, but he wasn't offended. When he left the citadel and went back out into the city, he knew where he was going and he didn't pretend otherwise, not even to himself. He lowered his hood as he stepped into the small room beyond the stable at the far side of the blacksmith's yard, and he found Gant there just as he'd promised. He was sitting at a small, round table in the steady light of a glass-cupped lamp, drinking beer from a tankard he'd maybe made himself, some bread and cheese lying half-eaten on a misshapen tin plate. He put the tankard down. He left the bread and cheese. He stood. His interest was clear.

When he took off his clothes, piece by piece, steady and deliberate, Boromir watched him do it. When he gave his own cock a few firm strokes till it was hard, Boromir's cheeks flushed hot but he watched that, too. Boromir licked his lips and went down on his knees on the scuffed wood floor. He took off his gloves and set them aside. He put his hands on him. He put his mouth on him while Gant's rough fingers twisted in his hair, till those fingers in his hair eased him back away again. 

Gant, naked in the lamplight, helped him to his feet. Gant, all hard planes, all angles nothing like the curves of armour that he'd made, all black hair coming loose out of its leather ties, kissed his mouth till he was breathless and then pushed him down over the tabletop, still clothed. Boromir let him pull his trousers down around his knees and push his shirt up underneath his arms, and let him rub his calloused fingers flat against his exposed hole. He couldn't find it in him to care too much about it when oil dripped on his clothes; what he cared about was Gant's fingertips pushing firm against him, and then into him, right down to the knuckles. What he cared about was how the head of his own hard cock brushed against the table as Gant began to move his fingers in him. What he cared about was the moment Gant replaced those fingers with the length of his cock. He cared about the muffled groan that said Gant wanted it just as much as he did.

Afterwards, he didn't stay. He joked and said there wasn't room, which wasn't much of a joke as there really wasn't room, not in Gant's single bed with its near-threadbare blanket. He didn't stay the next time, either, six nights later when he slipped out of the citadel in the middle of a rainstorm and when he got to Gant's room he shook his head like a dog and showered him in rainwater while Gant laughed and pushed him up against a wall. But when he'd got him there, against the wall, pressed to it with the weight of his own body, the laughter died out. Boromir's blunt fingers - calloused more from training and from battle than from labour - pressed to Gant's bare back and pulled him closer. 

Even barefoot, Gant was taller than him. He's broader than him, more muscular, more solid. He could have lifted him, Boromir thought, and he'd have wrapped his legs around his waist and stroked them both until they came. Gant's storm-grey eyes said he'd had the same thought, but what he did was turn him round and rub the head of his cock against the rim of his hole. What he did was drop down to his knees and swipe the flat of his tongue against him, hot and unanticipated. A flicker of the tip and Boromir groaned into the crook of his own arm. It didn't take much more than that for him to come, thighs weak, skin flushed, then Gant just dragged him down and had him on his knees, hands up against the fading limewashed wall.

Some nights after that, they talked before or after, or some nights talked instead. Some nights, they drank together, laughed, loosed each other's hair and pulled off each other's clothes. Some nights, Gant pushed him down onto his too-small bed and had him like that, face to face, with only lamplight on their skin. They've seen seasons pass and battles won and lost, and Gant makes him new armour to replace all the pieces that are lost outside the city gates. The High Warden of the White Tower is his most loyal customer. _Boromir_ is something else to him completely.

Gant lives above the smithy now, not in that small room across the yard. No one knows who his father was, or his mother, or any other kind of blood relation; he inherited the business that he operates from his former master, who took him in one day and put a hammer in his hand that's rarely been back out of it since. Perhaps he's not the most prestigious armourer in Minas Tirith, even now, and perhaps his work's not the most costly to purchase, the most impressive, but men who value form and function over spectacle prefer him to the others. He and his apprentices will put a breastplate on a man that will keep an arrow out his heart even if its looks are less shiny than others while it does so, but Boromir thinks he'd rather live plain than die decorated. That's a choice he can make for himself, at least.

Boromir leads the way up the stairs into the bedroom and Gant doesn't bother closing the door behind them because the others are all out running errands or still working in the forge. As Gant hangs up his apron and then pulls off his shirt and bares his chest, Boromir can hear the chime of metal beating metal not so very far away. When Gant pulls off his boots and pushes down his trousers, Boromir can almost feel the heat of the forge below. 

Gant has no family name, no wife, no children, only this place and the body he inhabits. He doesn't have the finest features Boromir has ever seen, or the sleekest hair, or the thickest muscles, or the longest cock. His nose must have been broken once and set a little crooked; he clearly didn't have the care for that injury that Boromir did for his own, so long ago. He has a chipped canine tooth and a scar running thickly through one eyebrow that he's had since before he can recall, or so he told him once, offhand, in bed. He's younger than Boromir is, they think, perhaps even younger than his brother, too, but somehow he looks older. None of it matters. 

There are protocols to follow. Amongst soldiers, perhaps, this could be overlooked, and were Gant even younger still it could be seen from the outside as quite an ordinary kind of arrangement. Boromir has been asked so many times to take this young man or that one, mentor them, help make them proper men, and he knows exactly what that means. A few times, he's considered it; it's the proper thing for him to do, after all, putting a sword in a man's hand while fucking him into his place in the world. If Gant were younger, they could pretend it's that, but he's not that young and he's not a soldier and when Boromir takes off his clothes and kneels on the mattress, when Gant runs his rough fingertips against the cleft of his arse, they both know no steward's son should do this.

He groans against his forearm as Gant traces the rim of his hole with the pad of his thumb. He groans into the pillows as Gant opens him slowly with the head of his cock. He almost trembles as Gant enters him. It's been weeks, but it feels like he's never been away.

There are things that the firstborn son of the Steward of Gondor should and shouldn't do. He should be honest and just and exemplify the virtues of their country. He should be strong and brave and fight tirelessly for that country. He should further his line. 

Boromir has never had a woman, though he lies sometimes and says he has, and he lies and says he wants to, too. 

He expects he'll marry one day, but all he wants is to come home from his battles to Gant's unmade bed, and the curled ends of his coal-singed hair, and press his mouth at the crook of Gant's neck until it's time for him to fight again. Gant would let him, he thinks. He'd pour him a cup of beer and kiss his mouth like he knows exactly who he is, and no one else does.

There are things the firstborn son of the Steward of Gondor should and shouldn't do. But while Boromir's there, he lets himself pretend he's someone else entirely. And, for now, perhaps for always, he finds that is enough.


End file.
